Thursday, July 27, 2006

Personal Development: Happiness = Success?!

Hi,

一句有關成功快樂的名句,很藉得回味:

Success is not the key to happiness.
成功不能令你快樂,
Happiness is the key to success.
快樂卻能令你成功;
If you love what you are doing,
如果你在做你愛做的事,
you will be successful.
你必能成功。

Albert Schweitzer


Keith
Explore, Exceed & Excel

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Personal Development: Success = Happiness?!

Hi,

Thanks a lots for all the comments about my last posting on "Success = Happiness?".

Most of you disagrees. I disagree too.

My opinion:

Success = Getting what you think you want. (i.e. it could be your goals, if you have)

If it is what you really want, you will be happy. But what you do might not something you really want!

If what you want is money. Earning money can make you happy. But if you just want what money can bring you, e.g. stability, earning lots of money can't make you happy. You will be happy until you turn the money into stability, like savings in bank. Spending the money will make you even more unhappy. It reduces what you really want - stability!

There is a 2-Steps Process to make your Success = Happiness. Share with you in my next posting.

Keith
Explore, Exceed & Excel

Updated: Aug 15 2008

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Success = Happiness?

Hi,

Success = Happiness, is it?

What do you think?

Keith

Personal Development: Balanced Life?

Hi,

Most of us do not have a balanced life. We focused our time and effort in some areas of our lives while ignoring other areas.

There are 2 ways to have a more balanced life.

Firstly, setting goals in various areas. This can be very tedious and difficult.

Secondly, we can have goal covering every areas of our life. Short term goals is quite impossible to do so, but longer term goal can. However, people seldom has long term goal.

The first option is difficult while few people do the second one. That's why most of our lives are not balanced.

I am not a fans of setting goals, but I do have long term goals.

Keith

Monday, July 10, 2006

Help or Not Help?

Hi,

Today, one of the Graduate Assistants of the NLP Practitioner Program asked me a good question - How do I decide when to or not to help a participant understanding a particular item during the training?

Sometimes I spend lot of time in helping a participant to understand more, but sometimes I just leave him/her alone. What are my criteria?

1. I help those who are willing to understand and explore. I never help anyone who is not willing to help him/herself. This can be a waste of time.

2. I will also help if the process can be meaningful to most of other participants. I am doing training but not coaching, counselling or therapy to one particular participant. If most of other participants can be benefited from the process, I will do so. Sensible people can learn more from these kinds of interactions than just watching the trainers delivering the planned materials.

Keith

Thursday, July 06, 2006

4,512 Ideas in 65 Minutes!!!

Hi,

I just faciliated our 2nd round Think-Tank 2006 tonight.

63 participants, 4,512 ideas in 65 minutes!!!

70 ideas per person, more than 1 idea per minutes!!!

Everybody is creative. We can only be more creative by creating more ideas ourselves. We can't become creative by watching or listening, only by actual doing.

Tonight is a proof!

If you want to be creative too, join our last round on October 4 2006. BTW, Think-Tank is free.

Keith

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Hong Kong's Service Level is Deteriorating!

Hi,

The service level in our city, Hong Kong is deteriorating! Can you believe it?

4 incidents in a week:

1. I visited a CD and Video shop a few days ago. I chose 2 DVDs. A shop staff approached me. I thought that she was trying to help me. But she just asked me to handle her DVDs with care or the plastic package will be broken.


2. I dined at an Italian Restaurant the day before yesterday. The receptionist was so rude that I thought I were back to the 60's. When my soup came, I still had not been given any spoon and forks. When my main course arrived, I even did not had my water served.


3. Yesterday, I had my dinner in a famous Chinese Restaurant. It is a chain-restaurants and I hoped a better service could be expected. But what I found was a cockroach in one of my dishes. I told the waiter and he just said that he would check with the kitchen. No appology! I asked him why he did not appologized for the coackroach. His answer was unbelievable. He told me that it was not his fault. He would check with the kitchen afterwards.

He came back a minute later. He said that the kitchen told him that it was not their problem. The cockroach might get into the dish after it was delivered to our table!


4. I must be having a bad week. I dined at a Japanese Restaurant tonight. After I had almost finished my dinner, I found that there was still one dish missing. I called for help from a waitress. She returned and said that the dish was already recorded in the computer and asked me to wait.

10 minutes later, I requested help from another waiter. He checked and told me the same story. Then, another 10 minutes later, I asked another waitress to check. I requested her to check it seriously as I had already been disappointed by two of her colleagues. She came back and explained to me that the dish was recorded in the computer but there was no such order in the kitchen. She told me that I could cancel the order. Interestingly, there was no appology!


What happened to our city?

Our government can only give us 2 directions for our economy for the future. One is Logistics and another one is Tourism.

Our infra-structures are too expensive for the logistics industry to grow. The only hope seems to be our tourist industry. Can we survive from our competitors in the region with such kind of service level? I am really doubt.

Customer service is something very interesting. Everybody understands it when they are on the receiving side, but not the case when someone is on the giving side.

I had been in the service industry for more than 16 years before I become a coach and trainer. I understand a sercret of great service. If you are also in the service industry (Who is not?! everyone is serving someone else!), you should understand it too.

I will talk about it later.

Keith

Saturday, July 01, 2006

What is Beauty?

Hi,

Beautiful things(people;-)) attract more!

Then what is beauty?

More than 2,300 years ago, Plato and Aristotle had already given us some insights. They were the great grandfathers of Aesthetics. Here is my consolidated version of their ideas:

1. Proportional. Scale of individual parts is proportional to each others and the whole.

2. Balance. The weight of the overall structure is well-distributed.

3. Consistent. Everything is in line with each others. No sudden surprise!

4. Different. Some differences leads to differentiations and your edge.

These 4 criteria apply to nearly everything. A proportional, balance, consistent life/work with some differences can be very beautiful and attractive!

Keith

Keith

Learning from Life #71 - #75

Hi,

If we intend to learn something from life, you will find that there are so much to be learned.

Here is another part of my Learning from Life Series:

71. What to do is more important than how to do!

72. Others can't advise you what to do, but they can help you in how to do something.

73. We all can be designer of our business, career, family and life. Use design concepts to think, but not think to design.

74. Live our lives fully and we will be less afraid to die.

75. Before you can be happy, you must make yourself not unhappy first.

Keith